A nurturing environment supports positive youth development and community engagement during adolescence and young adulthood

Key takeaways for caregivers

• Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a framework that focuses on factors that help youth (from adolescence through early adulthood) actively contribute to their own development and that of their community.
• Youth thrive when they have access to and take advantage of a nurturing environment, which provides resources and opportunities at home, in school, in the neighborhood, and in local and global contexts.
• Youth who report more positive developmental outcomes (like confidence, competence, character, caring, and connection, i.e., the 5Cs of PYD) are said to be thriving; they are also more likely to report fewer problem behaviors and emotional difficulties than their non-thriving peers.
• Across contexts and countries, youth who are thriving also tend to contribute to their families; schools; and local, community, and global activities.

Most caregivers want their youth to thrive, refrain from risky behaviors, be emotionally stable, and participate actively in their community. However, the primary goal of many initiatives for youth is often preventive in nature, focusing on how to avert problems and negative development rather than how to leverage young people’s strengths and support their positive development.

Positive Youth Development: A new way of seeing youth

Positive Youth Development is a developmental framework that guides research, policy, and practice through an emphasis on adolescents’ and young adults’ strengths and potential.  This perspective focuses on promoting resources and opportunities that align with youth’s strengths to empower them to actively contribute to their own development and that of their community.

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In our research across many countries, several desirable youth outcomes were linked to both youth’s strengths and the contextual resources and opportunities available to them. We refer to these strengths, resources, and opportunities collectively as developmental assets.

Developmental assets can be internal or external

The collection of strengths, resources, and opportunities that support youth’s development are interconnected and include both internal and external developmental assets. Internal assets represent youth strengths, like commitment to learning (e.g., achievement motivation, school engagement), positive values (e.g., integrity, responsibility), social competencies (e.g., planning and decision-making skills), and positive identity (e.g., self-esteem, sense of purpose).

External assets are resources and opportunities available to young people through their environment. These assets can include support (e.g., family support, caring school climate), empowerment (e.g., communities that value youth), boundaries and expectations (e.g., family and school boundaries, adult role models), and constructive use of youth’s time (e.g., creative activities, youth programs).

The 5Cs of Positive Youth Development and a 6^th C

The presence of both internal and external assets facilitates youth thriving or positive development, which has typically been measured using the 5Cs of PYD:

1. Competence (academic, physical and social),
2. Confidence (self-worth, appearance, and positive identity),
3. Character (behavioral conduct, social conscience, personal values, and diversity of values),
4. Caring (empathy and sympathy), and
5. Connection (healthy relationships with school, family, community, and peers).

Theoretically, thriving youth (i.e., those scoring high on the 5Cs of PYD) are more likely to contribute to their own development and to their family, school, local community, and global affairs than are their non-thriving peers. Contributions in these areas include developing skills that can be used to get a better job, helping family members, participating in school committees, volunteering to make one’s community a better place, and making efforts to conserve energy and protect the environment. Within PYD, contribution is referred to as the 6^th C.

Our cross-national research: Cross-National Positive Youth Development Network (CN-PYD)

Over a decade ago, an international group of experts in related fields formed a collaborative network to study how developmental assets support youth in various contexts. With a comprehensive approach, we bring expertise in multiple areas of psychology (e.g., health psychology, developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and social psychology), sociology, public health, environmental science, and family studies, among other disciplines.

Most of the youth in our research are adolescents and young ethnic-majority adults (ages 16 to 29) in more than 40 countries across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America.

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In our work, we seek to investigate how access to developmental assets is related to thriving and community engagement, as well as to other developmental outcomes across countries and different groups of youth. Our studies are mainly cross-sectional, which means that we collect data at a single point in time from participants of different ages.

This method provides insights relevant to patterns over time. But it is difficult to establish a clear cause-and-effect relationship using this approach because differences between individuals in different age groups might be due to factors other than age or the passage of time.

The power of developmental assets: The more the better

In our research across countries, we have found evidence of the positive associations of developmental assets with thriving and other positive developmental outcomes, as well as negative links with problem behaviors and emotional difficulties. Regardless of age, gender, and parents’ level of education (e.g., whether they went to school for a few years or earned college or professional degrees), having more developmental assets related to having better outcomes (in terms of both the increase in desirable outcomes and the reduction of less desirable outcomes).

More developmental assets relate to more positive outcomes

Numerous findings across countries suggest the promotive role of both internal and external developmental assets. For example:

• Albanian youth (12- to 19-year-olds living in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia) who reported a stronger commitment to learning (internal asset) or better support from their family, school, and neighborhood (external asset) also reported higher levels of academic achievement than youth without those assets.
• Slovenian 15-year-olds who reported a stronger commitment to learning (internal asset) also reported higher levels of academic achievement than their peers who did not demonstrate that asset.
• Among high school students (15- to 19-year-olds) in Norway, stronger commitment to learning and positive values (internal assets) and stronger empowerment and more constructive use of time (external assets) were associated with thriving. In this self-report survey, thriving was measured as a combination of good physical health and leadership, and the ability to delay gratification, overcome of adversity, value diversity, achieve school success, and help others.
• Adolescents and young adults (mean age of 22 years) living in Chile who had a stronger positive identity (internal asset) reported healthier psychological well-being than their peers with a weaker positive identity.

More developmental assets relate to fewer negative outcomes

Developmental assets also appear to have a protective role for behavioral and emotional difficulties across different countries. For example:

• Among high school students (15- to 19-year-olds) in Norway, fewer developmental assets (i.e., each of the internal and external assets described earlier, except for constructive use of time, an external asset) was associated with emotional difficulty (prolonged sadness or attempted suicide).
• Adolescents and young adults (17- to 30-year-olds) in Colombia and Peru who reported fewer developmental assets were more engaged in problematic substance use than peers with more of these assets.

Internal and external assets are interrelated and depend on the context

In our studies, we have often found that internal assets predict youth outcomes more than external assets. While this could indicate that internal assets are more important for development than external assets, the two types of assets are consistently linked, with higher levels in one associated with higher levels in the other. This pattern suggests that internal and external assets may reinforce each other.

Young people from countries with better economic and political stability (e.g., Norway) generally reported higher levels of the assets (commitment to learning, social competencies, support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations) than did youth from developing contexts (e.g., Ghana).

For example, among 16- to 20-year-olds in Norway, support (an external asset) in three contexts (family, neighborhood, and school) was positively related to positive identity (an internal asset) after accounting for demographic variables like age, gender, and parents’ level of education.

In addition, developmental assets can depend on the conditions or contexts in which youth grow up. For instance, we found that young people from countries with better economic and political stability (e.g., Norway) generally reported higher levels of the assets (commitment to learning, social competencies, support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations) than did youth from developing contexts (e.g., Ghana). Socio-economic status impacts the developmental assets that are available.

Moreover, in societies in which youth were marginalized (e.g., Roma and Egyptian communities in Albania), our findings indicated fewer and lower levels of each of the internal and external assets among the youth from these communities than among youth living in a majority context. 

PYD stance: Thriving youth are more likely to contribute to their communities

As we noted earlier, youth who are thriving (i.e., scoring high on the 5Cs of PYD) are also more likely to contribute to their own development and that of their communities. The PYD perspective considers the 5Cs to be building blocks of contribution.

For example: young people with greater confidence, caring, and/or connection to their communities are likely to be more ready and willing to work actively towards self-improvement and the betterment of their environments. High competence may be linked to greater ability to effectively grow individually and contribute positively to community changes. Lastly, youth reporting a high sense of character may be more motivated to work harder towards positive change.

Our research findings support connections between 5Cs and engagement in several countries

For example, among 16- to 20-year-olds in Norway, we found character (an indicator of thriving) to be important for engaging at the local, community, and global levels. Engagement at these levels included helping friends and neighbors, making community a better place, and making efforts to conserve energy and protect the environment, respectively.

Similarly, in Ghana, among university students (ages 16 to 27 years), we found significant associations between four of the 5Cs (all but connection) and indicators of environmental concern (i.e., attitudes toward pollution, intention and behavior regarding environmental conservation, and environmental responsibility), although associations with environmental responsibility were not significant.

In Spain, among university students (ages 18 to 28 years), we found that several components of the 5Cs (character, connection, and caring) were associated with social contribution and pro-environmental behaviors. Thus, while more empirical evidence is needed, our network’s general findings across different countries link youth’s thriving to youth’s contributions.

Indicators of thriving are not always adaptive: A caveat about caring

Within the PYD movement, there is a theoretical assumption that like the other Cs, caring (a combination of empathy and sympathy) protects against problem behaviors and emotional difficulties. But in our research, greater caring was associated with more emotional difficulties (e.g., anxiety, depression) in Slovenian youth, as well as among adolescents and young adults in Spain and Peru. One possibility is that caring often draws on high empathy, which can cause people to absorb or mirror others’ distress and become increasingly anxious themselves. Based on these findings, we are working to identify different groups of youth that may be at risk for problem behaviors or emotional challenges, and designing interventions to address these difficulties.

Facilitating thriving and contribution in youth: What can communities do?

Most of our research findings have come from cross-sectional studies, making it difficult to identify causal relationships. The connections between assets and outcomes may be caused by factors we have not explored.

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However, our findings align with the theoretical assumption of PYD that developmental assets promote thriving and ultimately, contribution. Thriving might also contribute to increased assets and contribution. For example, feeling competent may support higher self-esteem (an internal asset) and elicit more support from family and friends (external assets).

Therefore, our findings have implications for programs and initiatives for young people. We recommend that policymakers, program designers, educators, parents, and other caregivers utilize the following strategies for promoting positive youth development and contribution:

• Ensure that youth have access to resources and opportunities (i.e., external assets) to develop personal skills. Home, school, neighborhood, and local community are immediate contexts where youth live, work, study, and play. What happens in these contexts has significant consequences for young people’s future roles as responsible adults. Ensuring a nurturing environment with access to adequate assets for skills development is crucial.
• Collaborate among youth contexts. To maximize youth’s access to developmental assets, families, schools, and local communities need to collaborate to provide resources and opportunities.
• Remember that youth are diverse and may require different assets to thrive. Youth may require a combination of different assets to thrive. However, all youth will thrive better when they experience more assets within and across both internal and external categories of assets.
• Engage youth. Work together with youth to provide developmental assets. Create arenas for open discussion about young people’s needs and ways of interacting with the community.
• Provide opportunities to connect and contribute. Youth need to rely on their personal strengths to actively engage with their contexts. But these strengths do not develop automatically. They tend to develop and are further sharpened in healthy relationships with caring adults and significant others who can widen youth’s opportunities and possibilities not just to connect but also to contribute.

The PYD framework and related research offer helpful perspective that shifts the focus away from preventing undesirable outcomes and, instead, targets the promotion of healthy outcomes. With this approach, communities can strive for a glass half full, instead of trying to avoid a glass half empty. Stakeholders can help adolescents and young adults leverage their internal and external assets to reach their fullest potential both as individuals and as citizens of their community.